Reviews with content warning for Police brutality - The Half Life of Valery K

I just finished “The Half Life of Valery K” by Natasha Pulley. In all her books, Natasha Pulley writes terrible things happening and acknowledges they are terrible, but the characters are so engaging and there is a sweetness that keeps you reading. This one is no exception, and it has a whole HOST of trigger warnings. I’m sure you can look them up, but the biggest one for me was nuclear accidents and radiation sickness. (It may seem odd for this to be my biggest one considering what all happens in the book, but there is personal history there.) This #book is a bit of a thriller, and a bit of a character study, and it’s queer. And there’s an octopus named Albert who steals the TV remote. So.

This one will stay with me for a while.

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zosiablue's review

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dark hopeful inspiring sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

Oh I LOVED this. Simultaneously terrifying (gulags! human radiation trials! Russia in the '60s!) and tender (a beautiful and subtle gay love story! people healing from institutional trauma!). One of those books from Page 1 where I got immediately sad it would be over someday. Not for everyone, but it was for me in this moment. Bonus: the scariest last line of an afterword, ever?

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wheemsicott's review

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dark sad tense slow-paced

2.5

When it comes to Pulley's books, I'm used to looking past the degree of cultural insensitivity she casually throws in the mix every time; I don't think she's capable of coming up with anything that won't elicit a "why is a british white woman writing about this" reaction from me and I've come to just let that stuff sit in the back of my brain while I go along for the ride. The Half Life of Valery K was no exception. I accepted she felt qualified to write about the Soviet Union in such excruciating detail and, while I disagree with her about whether she should, I still enjoyed the characters she crafted.

The plot dragged a bit and I was sad to see all speculative traces wiped out in the face of hard science, but I get it. It fit the story Pulley wanted to tell. What really lowered my rating and soured my general experience of this book to the point I can't think about it without feeling sick is the way it handled patriarchal violence. Pulley wanted so bad to analyze the ways in which men hurt women, but instead she wrote a novel about a male biochemist trying to shed light on the top-secret radiation study he's involved with. And she made the main "villain" (the term feels quite cheap here, but bear with me) a woman.

Already that undermines the goal; not because a woman is doing bad things, but because the protagonist is a guy and his love interest is also a guy. Not the most practical canvas to depict male tyranny. Pulley does try to weave in some social commentary from Valery's Feminist King point of view, and for the most part it works! I believe it! Until she feels the need to put the train sequence in there.

The train sequence is a terrifying, disturbing account of something so inhuman it pushes Valery to kill every single man involved. Good on him, but we first hear about it in a scene that's meant to solely make some ripples in the budding romance between him and his guy. It's all to make him even more sympathetic (as if we needed that--dude's a traumatized kitten) and amp up the tension. We could've done without. We could've done without, or used something else, and instead we get the rape and murder of many desperate young women and girls stuck on a train to the gulag. Now, of course I'm not saying you can't write about these things. You can, and you could argue Pulley does it masterfully by building a visceral crescendo to the act and then cutting right before it happens. But she writes the whole thing as fuel for her male main character. She tries so hard to criticize gendered violence, only to reproduce it on the text in a way that is potentially deeply triggering--just because she needs to make Valery even sadder. Just because she can have him say "almost all (cis) men are monsters ready to explode". What godawful fucking framing, to be frank.

Anyway. I am a fool and I only wanted to write a quick note about a book that clearly chose its subject matter wrong, but here's the full rant instead. I don't think The Half Life of Valery K is an unreadable mess, but it did make me feel gross.

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pvbobrien's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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breadwitchery's review

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adventurous mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

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ninjamuse's review

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emotional funny tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.75

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bel017's review

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adventurous challenging dark sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix

Too horrifying for me (though I finished it), should have checked the content warnings first.

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spacebornfew's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

On one hand, this book gave me exactly what I wanted, it follows a formula that just makes something in my heart clench. It was, as always with Natahsa Pulley novels, hauntingly beautiful, tragic and tender. With bonus octopus.

However it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore how poorly her female characters are treated. You can't help but feel that they are plot devices purely there to move things along for the leading men. Considering the book explores sexism and gender, at some points in quite a heavy handed manner, it feels incredibly jarring to still not have women exist to have some purpose beyond window dressing.

It's also very dark, at points a lot darker than her other novels which I had not entirely expected.

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